Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 4 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Look Me In The Eye & Tell Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.14.2013
The partners know enough to know they should be feeling crummy about this, but have no choice in practice but to overlook the entire thing, whatever stupid fourth-years, and the last order of business is "guarded approval" for the Stack class action. I wish this weren't just a toss-off idea -- and maybe it isn't, but this week it is -- because that's exactly the kind of shit this show is currently about: The way treating companies like people, protecting them from the future, giving them shelter from the world's and society's best interests, is exactly the fight that defines us, as a culture, right now.
And the higher Alicia climbs in L/G, the more clearly you can see how a corporation ends up making those decisions, which become monstrous only ever in aggregate: Nobody is a villain in their own movie, no single individual decision made to serve your company is destructive in and of itself. A need to protect your IP, for example, becomes a mandate to define the infrastructure of the Digital Frontier for future generations, becomes a lobby of people who don't understand the internet or how information can be freely duplicated in a way a loaf of bread cannot and thus can't be sold like loaves of bread, becomes bought legislation written up and sold to the highest bidder to product your financial interests and defend the world as you understand it against these young people who just want to destroy everything, becomes the motivation to set precedent cases and public opinion by pillorying educated activists whom you should actually be employing to explain these things to you but becomes a trumped-up fight about paranoia and privacy, becomes the decisions made by lawyers and the FBI guys who want to do their jobs well by following these new ill-formed laws as carefully as possible, becomes the death of one of our generation's smartest futurists. All you wanted to do was sell records, or DVDs or whatever, and at the end of that snowball you became a murderer.
OUTSIDE
Alicia: "Robyn Burdine, since Kalinda and I are -- you know -- and she and Cary are probably -- you know -- I need you to do something for me. Sneaky and subtle, and without getting your adorable quirk all over me because it really pisses me off, like, your whole personality is seemingly a checklist of things that make me want to slap you. Can you do this?"
Robyn Burdine: "Nope! I can't do that. But I can believe that I am trying to do that, which will have to be enough. Did you know that I'm up for review this week?"
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